Nuts, Levitating Aliens, etc...
I am steadily settling down to my Trivandrum routine. As part of my morning
routine, I read a few newspapers (some in the toilet), mostly for entertainment
rather than enlightenment. I read the Malayalam papers for local politics
and Kerala news and The Hindu and sometimes the Indian Express for national
news. Rest of the stuff, I get from the www. The international news coverage
in Malayalam newspapers is pathetic - mainly stuff taken off the wire and
translated badly - and I generally don't read it. Still, there was one
article that caught my eye the other day about Sony recalling Toshiba batteries.
It would have been just another news but for the fact that in reality it
was Toshiba recalling Sony batteries, similar to what Dell had to do as
the Sony batteries were exploding into fireballs. This article had it upside
down but who cares. There was a nice picture of a laptop and the chances
of somebody in Toshiba reading Malayalam is remote. I was interested in
the news because I have a Dell as well as a Toshiba laptop and was worried
when they were going to flare up. (The Dell laptop is OK, but I don't know
about the Toshiba as I had left it in Japan.)
I mentioned reading in the toilet at the beginning. This has been one of
my favourite morning fixations right from childhood days so much so that
I had expressly asked the guys who built my house in Trivandrum to build
a bookrack in the toilet. They promptly ignored me and built the toilet
to their taste - normal, mundane, run-of-the-mill toilet with no bookrack!
Then - I apologize for being repetitive - the toilet seat broke. Now, reading
in the toilet has become more of a combat sport for me (the seat cover
keeps falling on to my back) because of the malfunctioning toilet seat.
The sanitary ware industry in India is very advanced, if you believe the
ads. They make space-age stuff and that is where the problem is. Because,
only levitating aliens from outer space can conceivably s(h)it on it. A
human being, weighed down by gravity, would find it really tough. Unless
of course, you have had a million tons of dal and channa the previous evening,
which could then produce the gazillion joules of thrust necessary to keep
you afloat over the toilet bowl. My hunch is that the guys who design and
manufacture this stuff either don't $h*t at all or they like it the Indian
way (or perhaps it is the great outdoors for them). To be frank, I'm going
nuts because of all this $h*t.
Talking of nuts, while reading the news on Hingis whipping Sania at Kolkata
in The Hindu one morning, I happened to glance at a sentence in the left-hand
column. "Tamil Nadu might have relegated Kerala to the second position
in the matter of production of nuts, said N. Ananthan...." Being an
MCP (Mallu Chauvinistic Pig), I immediately started worrying. I don't like
Kerala to be number two in anything, even if it is in the production of
nut cases. Whatever happened to our vaunted social model? When you think
of it, Tamil Nadu has a bigger population and it is perfectly natural for
them to have more nuts. Still, it was spoiling my morning. Maybe, just
maybe, we're producing a better class of nuts. Perhaps quality, not quantity
is our motto and we are producing highly literate and better-educated nuts.
So, immediately after checking on the Hingis-Sania score line (6-1, 6-0)
I shifted my attention to the nuts story. The story, as it turned out,
was about coconuts production, but it didn't bring any solace to me. We
were number two. And as a small step to address the issue, I'm thinking
of planting a few coconut trees.
P.S. Chikungunia update: A homeopathic cure is being prescribed as a preventive
medicine. I have also taken it. Hope it works. In the meantime, the government
continues to play the blame game. There was a simple measure they could
have taken (and it is still not too late to take). That is, exterminating
or containing the mosquito menace, but that is not sexy. "The government
today decided to kill mosquitoes" doesn't have the same ring to it
as, say, "The government today decided to appoint a judicial commission
to determine the plight of poor and working-class chikungunias (people
who have chicken with mosquitoes as a side dish), with special stress on
the health minister's role in communicating communicable diseases more
effectively with the help of hospitals, who play a positive role by disposing
off their medical waste at various key places in the middle of the night.
The government also decided to send a special team comprising of senior
officials, doctors and politicians to Western Europe to study the impact
of expressways on chikungunias".